Day of Reckoning for N.C.A.A.

June 6, 2014

Joe Nocera

I began writing about the N.C.A.A. two and a half years ago, more or less by accident. Assigned by The New York Times Magazine to imagine a scheme in which athletes in the revenue sports — football and men’s basketball — get paid, I was awakened for the first time to inequities in the world of big-time college sports. Of course I knew that the coaches were getting rich while the players were getting nothing; everybody knew that. But I didn’t think that much about it. Neither did most fans, I would venture to guess.

In the course of my reporting, though, I began to see things differently. Big-time college athletes aren’t just playing a sport for the fun of it; they are a free labor force generating revenue in a multibillion dollar industry. Is it really right for Nick Saban, the football coach at Alabama to make $6.9 million a year — that’s the size of his new contract — while his players have to be content with a college scholarship? A scholarship, I might add, that doesn’t even guarantee a decent education, since so many players are guided into “courses” that simply allow them to remain eligible.

The N.C.A.A.’s highhanded ways — its investigations that lack not just due process but any sense of fairness, its petty rules and its cartel nature — all began to come into focus. “Amateurism,” the N.C.A.A.’s core concept, was, I firmly came to believe, a smoke screen designed to protect a lucrative business model that worked for everybody except the athletes. Although athletes are usually thought of as big men on campus, I discovered that many of them, coming from disadvantaged backgrounds, were essentially penniless during their college years.

So that original magazine story about paying the players went from being an interesting thought exercise to something I really believed in. I also thought that athletes should get extended scholarships, and more protections if they were injured or their health was compromised. I was convinced that the day would arrive when some of these changes would take place. But given the power and recalcitrance of the N.C.A.A., I thought that such a radical change was at least a decade away.

On Monday, however, in a courtroom in Oakland, Calif., a trial will begin that could shorten that timetable considerably. It’s the O’Bannon case, named after Ed O’Bannon, the former U.C.L.A. basketball star who is the lead plaintiff in an antitrust lawsuit that claims the N.C.A.A. has illegally conspired to prevent former and current college athletes from controlling — and profiting from — their own images and likenesses. (Disclosure: William Isaacson of the firm Boies, Schiller & Flexner is one of the lawyers representing O’Bannon. My wife works for the same firm, but she has no role in the case and does not stand to gain financially if O’Bannon wins.)

What is particularly striking to me on the eve of the trial is the sense I have that many sportswriters and fans have traveled the path I did these past few years, and have gotten to the same place. The N.C.A.A. argues that if amateurism is done away with, college sports as we know them will go away. Amateurism, Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, told me a few years ago, helps ensure “competitive fairness across schools and institutions.” He added, “We want to minimize the involvement of third parties and others who seek to take advantage of an individual young person.”

Is there anyone, aside from the most hard-core N.C.A.A. defenders, who actually believes that anymore? The disparity between the grown-up haves and the teenage have-nots has simply grown too big to ignore.

A few days ago, I asked Sonny Vaccaro, the former sneaker marketer who now devotes his life to trying to force the N.C.A.A. to change, what he hoped the trial would bring. “In some ways, we have already won,” he said. “People inside the system are advocating for four-year scholarships and other changes that will benefit kids. People have humanized the athletes. That’s really important.”

There is no guarantee, of course, that the plaintiffs will win in O’Bannon. Time and again over the years, the N.C.A.A. has been able to carry the day in court with its paeans to the wonders of amateurism. This time, the judge, Claudia Wilken, has essentially said that she doesn’t think the concept of amateurism has a place in an antitrust trial. The central issue is whether the N.C.A.A. model is pro-competitive or anticompetitive. Just like any other antitrust trial.

Nearly two decades ago, a man named Walter Byers — who first built the N.C.A.A. into the force that it became, and then, late in his career, turned against it — wrote a memoir in which he said that only two institutions could force the N.C.A.A. to change: Congress or the courts.